


The Doom Generation

by SharpestRose



Category: Red Embrace (Video Games), Red Embrace: Hollywood
Genre: F/M, Gen, Recreational Drug Use, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-10
Updated: 2019-09-10
Packaged: 2020-10-13 15:51:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20585066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SharpestRose/pseuds/SharpestRose
Summary: Set in Heath's third ending, Coma. Mia, the young Golgotha who caused so many shifts in Hollywood's vampire world, tries to find equilibrium as she works towards the new age.





	The Doom Generation

**Author's Note:**

> This story is extremely self-indulgent but since playing the game I've become obsessed with wondering what life is like for the protagonist I played on this particular route -- why would someone so ambitious and driven in her public choices also choose Heath and David as her private life? I wanted to explore one possible explanation behind it.
> 
> Rating is for inclusion of drug use and extremely dubious life choices; sex is non-explicit.

It’s been a long night. Not as exhausting as they were in those first weeks after the city’s change in leadership, but still pretty busy. Mia stretches her legs out underneath the booth and takes another swallow of her drink. “How’s Morgan?”

Zhang gives her a broad cheshire smile. “An extremely quick study. I’m going to run out of things to teach her. Then we’ll be the blind leading the blind.”

Mia snorts. “Despite those glasses she wears, I’m pretty sure all vampires have perfect vision.”

“Ah, well, she’s hardly the only one with a fondness for spectacles,” Zhang replies, taking a sip of his own glass of laced blood. “She’s already adept enough at handling her powers to be teaching others. We’re meeting with Andrei later in the week to discuss turning some promising candidates and putting Morgan in charge of them.”

“Oh?” Mia perks up. Even the smallest developments in the other branches of Andrei’s plans are worth her attention, these days. Her own activities rarely get any reaction out of Heath anymore when she tells him about them, but new vampires might catch his interest. Expanding numbers means a slightly larger world for him to exist within.

“You’re more one for pets than proteges, though, aren’t you?” Zhang suggests, smile turning sly.

“That’s fair,” Mia answers with a laugh, taking another swallow of blood wine as she concedes the point. “I’m basically the vampire equivalent of a crazy cat lady, aren’t I? Hardly the most romantic trope about lunacy for a Golgotha to choose for themselves.”

“A comfortable madness is hardly the worst fate.”

Saturnalia hasn’t changed much from how it used to be, the same faded glamour pervading the atmosphere. Mia thinks back to those earliest nights when she visited, when she’d come to spend time with Heath as he worked behind the bar, her stomach flipping with the giddy butterflies of new infatuation.

She’d needed something, _anything_ to cling to then, her body barely dead and her whole world turned inside-out around her. Compared to the intrigue and politics of the rest of Mia’s new existence, Heath was as straightforward as a needle in a vein, a familiar kind of mistake.

Even now, when so much is different and her perspective on her beginnings has shifted, Mia still isn’t sure whether she’d have survived that first plunge headlong into vampirism without Heath. If she hadn’t had the outlet of their relationship to make all her bad choices in, somewhere to put all her clinging codependent naked _need_, then who knows what stumbles she might have made, or what a misstep in that world of vipers might have cost her?

Thoughts of those early nights makes Mia remember the Golgotha she’d met in Saturnalia, shooting up morphine and antipsychotics to dull their visions.

“Have you ever taken anything? Drugs, I mean. Harder than alcohol,” she asks Zhang now.

He grins. “I went through a phase of preying on the patrons of opium dens, but that was more convenience than proclivity — nobody ever questioned the sight of a Chinese man hauling a deadweight figure along if it was near one of those establishments.”

“Clever.”

Zhang spreads his hands wide. “I have my moments. As delightful as your company always is, Mia, you should probably get going before the hour gets any later, if you intend to buy cat food on the way home.”

-

She grabs takeout for David from one of the diners on her route back to the apartment. Not the healthiest meal she could provide by any stretch, but Mia knows he likes the soda that comes with the burger deal. Next stop is one of Heath’s suppliers, where she picks up a few bags of regular blood, one spiked with benzos, and one with MDMA.

“Crazy cat lady, heading home to her kittens,” Mia mutters to herself with a chuckle.

-

David’s sitting on his bed when she opens the door to his room, no book or cd player or anything in front of him. Mia frowns slightly to herself as she hands over the paper bag and the sugary drink that he likes.

“Have you done anything interesting while I’ve been out?”

“Just waited for you,” he answers happily, putting the meal on his nightstand and staring at her expectantly.

“We’ve talked about this,” she says, trying to be gentle and firm. She’s never been good at this stuff. Her dad was always yelling at her because she never made the dog get down off the sofa when she was a kid. Zhang’s right, she’s not cut out for guiding anyone. “You’ve got to get out in the world more, okay? Go buy some books or albums or something. Sit and watch movies with Heath.”

The last suggestion makes him scowl, and Mia has to bite back a smile. She finds his jealousy hopelessly endearing. “C’mere.”

He falls into her arms happily, baring his neck for the pierce of her teeth.

-

Heath transfers some of the MDMA-laced blood from its bag into a glass and stows the rest in the fridge with the other bags. “Oh, sorry, did you want some too?”

Mia shakes her head, a little regretfully. “I’m sitting in on a meeting Andrei’s having with some colleagues from upstate in the evening. Gotta be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for that.”

They make out for a long time, and she holds him and plays with his hair the way she knows he likes. On the TV, William Wallace sees a vision of his lost love in the crowd at his execution. Heath sighs happily, pressing close against her body.

-

She stops by the Abattoir before her meeting, trying Dorian’s latest confection as she collects his reports. He took over the role of information gatherer after Aleusha left the city. Mia gets postcards from her sometimes, sent to her care of the club. Markus sent a letter to her once, too — no actual letter in the envelope, only a small origami unicorn and a box of extra film for a polaroid camera.

Mia’s pretty sure that the unicorn is a reference to that “director’s cut” of _Blade Runner_ that came our a few years ago. She remembers watching it with Heath, who owns both versions of the movie. The director’s cut slices away the happy ending, replaces it with uncertainty, but Heath likes it better.

Aside from his cast-iron favourite — _True Romance_, which Mia could perform entirely from memory at this point — hardly any of the movies Heath likes have happy endings. For all that he adores the fantasy lives that celluloid offers him, he doesn’t seem to trust them as much as Mia first expected.

“Good evening, star.”

Mia turns to the small figure that’s appeared beside her at the bar. “Evening, Auberi. Funny we should see each other just now. I was thinking about ambiguous endings, like our first conversation.”

“Maybe that’s why we’re seeing each other now,” Auberi counters. “It could be a repeated motif. Speaking of our first conversation, I never asked — how did you like the dramatic performance I mentioned?”

Mia’s thoughts flash to a graveyard tableau, Andrei cradling Heath’s upturned face in his hands. She taps the corner of her eye and gives Auberi a crooked smile. “Iscari might have more natural talent in the arts, but nobody accounts for all the angles quite like us Golgotha,” she tells them. “It was a good enough take to use in the narrative I wanted.” 

“Careful, star. If you complicate things, your favourite parts might end up on the cutting room floor.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Mia promises, tone earnest. She trusts loopy Golgotha bullshit more than most other machinations and threats; they rarely bother to lie about anything important. She wonders if that’s true of her own interactions with people, or if she’s more like Heath than she is like her House mates. It probably doesn’t matter, for now at least.

“I saw _Nosferatu_, like you suggested,” she tells Auberi. “I think I still like _Metropolis_ better, though.”

“You should take a look at _Caligari _next_._”

“I plan to. Heath found a print of it; I just need to convince him to come to a theatre with me some night so we can screen it.” Mia checks her watch and sighs. “I have to go. I’ll see you round, Auberi. Take care, Dorian.”

-

She stops at a newsstand on the way to the meeting, grabbing a selection of the week’s most lurid tabloids. Andrei looks at them with undisguised distaste when Mia drops the pile onto the meeting-room table in front of him, but she expected that. The cheap stack of newsprint represents most of what he loathes most about modern culture.

“We should get some of these on our side,” she says. If her partnership with Heath gives her thoughts a manipulative Iscari skew, then she might as well steer that to everyone’s advantage. “They can start covering the ~secret vampire illuminati~ in a way that makes it easier for us to manoeuvre. You think Bruce Wayne doesn’t carefully orchestrate how many ridiculous rumours circulate saying that he’s secretly Batman? How better for us to start putting ourselves in plain sight than by doing so in a way everyone will automatically dismiss and ignore? Saorise kept it all muzzled, but I don’t think that’s the way. We should reach out to them.”

Andrei nods, thoughtful, but doesn’t offer more than that. Mia’s used to his ways by now. He’ll offer an answer when he’s certain of it, but not before. She’s forcing herself to learn patience. Diplomacy got her this far, even if it doesn’t come all that naturally to her.

-

The meeting with Andrei’s out-of-town associates is long and complicated. Mia concentrates hard on paying attention, both to the surface conversation of plans and logistics and also to the bright, sharp sparks that sting the edge of her consciousness as they debate the finer points of each proposal. Real swordplay would probably be less abrasive on her senses.

As they part ways, business concluded for the time being, one of the visiting vampires shakes Mia’s hand for a beat too long.

“You must be the new one we’ve all heard much about.”

“I have a knack for gaining reputations,” she replies. “Whether they’re warranted isn’t always as so readily apparent.”

“The knack extends to more than reputation, the way I hear it,” he goes on. “If the rumours are true, and you’ve found yourself a Strix. They really are quite remarkable, aren’t they?”

Mia gives him a tight smile. “I suppose.”

-

After so many nights encouraging him to find reasons to leave the apartment, Mia dislikes the idea of requesting that David stays in for a few nights, but the conversation with Andrei’s associate has left her feeling territorial and on-edge. The outside world with its politics and planning gets most of her time and energy, and she gives it gladly, but this little set of rooms with its dark shadows and pale, lost souls, only substantial because she holds their wisps together in some semblance of self… those are _hers_, and she won’t give them up for anything, not even for the sake of playing nice with powerful allies.

“It’s just until they go back upstate,” she says to David, who just smiles at her in mild puzzlement.

“I don’t have anywhere to go anyway,” he answers, and for once Mia’s relieved that his world is so narrow.

“You can call your family, or send a postcard or something, you know,” she tells him, because otherwise she’s going to start feeling guilty about how comfortable she is with his undivided worship. She left guilt behind with her human life. “Just so they know you’re okay. I still call my dad every once in a while, so he doesn’t worry. I don’t miss him or anything, I just… just don’t want him to worry.”

“It’s hard for me to think much about mine. They seem so far off. They don’t matter. Nothing really matters… except you, Mia, of course,” David replies, the last words rapturous, eyes shining wetly in the low light as he stares at her like she’s salvation.

She kisses him on the forehead, then smiles a little and rubs at the lipstick smear she left behind. “You’re sweet.”

“My personality, or my blood?” he counters. It’s an old joke, but familiarity makes her fond of it.

Mia takes him into her arms and bites into his throat as gently as she can, eliciting a long animal moan of pleasure that vibrates through his throat, making the skin buzz against her lips. She’ll try talking to him about his family some other time.

-

Heath’s watching _My Own Private Idaho_ tonight. It nearly makes Mia miss the endless nights when he watched _True Romance_ almost on a loop. At least that has a happy ending. She’s exhausted with tragic love and dead lovers and all the other fragile sorrows that populate the bulk of his film collection.

She lies down beside him and presses in for a kiss, wondering how much of David’s unique flavour Heath can taste on her tongue. “I’ve got tomorrow night off, you know.”

Heath’s eyes light up with an increasingly-rare expression of excitement and he sits up, reaching for the drawer where they keep their works. He helps her shoot up before injecting himself, the familiar ketamine warmth blooming between them, wrapping them up in its false promises of life and pleasure. They press their bodies close and Mia clings to Heath, her grip on him as fierce as his on her.

The plots, the politics, the clash and gleam of hallucinatory daggers, all those cares fade away as they rock together, bodies greedy and entwined.

At least these are hallucinations she chooses for herself, a ruin of her own design. Better to steer her own destruction than have it handed to her by random fate, a fate that picked her out of a crowd in the dark for reasons she’ll never understand and filled her head with visions and blood forever.

-

It’s almost midnight the following night before Mia bothers to get out of bed. The screen of her computer clicks into life with a cathode-ray buzz, the modem twanging and whirring as she waits for her email inbox to load. Andrei hates the internet and electronic messaging, of course, but it’s more convenient than delivering every report by hand or relaying complex messages over the telephone.

Zhang in particular seems to appreciate all the different colours and fonts they have at their disposal when they use online communication; tonight’s letter is in a bruise-green comics font that makes Mia’s eyes water with its ugliness.

Below the message he’s included one of the little animated graphics he likes to collect from the websites he visits. This one’s of a cartoon fox, romping happily across the screen in blocky, jerking motions. It reminds Mia of a picture book she had as a child, _The Little Prince_, and the fox’s plea for the prince to tame him, and the wisdom later offered: _You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed._

She thinks of the visiting San Francisco vampire, how quickly he or someone else would snatch up David if she tried to let him go, if she pushed him out of this dark little nest. Tame animals can’t protect themselves in the wild. Mia can almost see it in front of her, realer than the glow of the computer screen, another reality overlaying it like a double-exposed photograph. Bitter green eyes, sugary soda in the back of her throat.

She shuts off the computer and pinches the bridge of her nose, squeezing her eyes shut. Her visions are often as much a literal headache as a metaphorical one. If the pain doesn’t fade quickly, she’ll ask Heath if he has anything she can take for it.

-

Hours later, _Gimme Shelter_ plays quietly on the TV as they sit on the bed together, Heath curled against Mia’s side as she plays with his hair. A hesitant knock at the doorframe makes her look over, and she blinks in surprise at seeing David there, posture nervous and ready to flee. Usually, he and Heath seem to do their best to pretend that the other doesn’t exist, avoiding shared spaces whenever possible.

“I heard the Stones playing. They were my favourite, when I used to care about that stuff,” he explains. “Can… can I come watch, too?”

Heath stiffens a little against her but Mia runs her fingers through his hair soothingly, calming a skittish cat. “Of course, David, come in,” she answers.

He settles on the floor on her side of the bed, close enough that Mia can pet his hair, too. She remembers the scruffy beanie that he wore the first couple of times she met him, and feels glad that she made him get rid of it. The simple tactile comfort eases some of the tension left in her from work.

When ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ begins to play, David speaks again. “Guns N’ Roses covered this for that _Interview with the Vampire_ movie, but I didn’t like their version as much. Christian Slater was cute in it, though.”

“River Phoenix was supposed the play that role,” Heath says. Mia thinks it might be the first time he’s ever directly acknowledged David’s existence. “But he died before shooting began. It was a great loss to the film, I think.”

“That kid from _Stand by Me_? Bummer. He would have been good,” David replies, pressing his head more insistently against Mia’s hand. She scratches his scalp obligingly.

“I do like Slater in other parts, though,” Heath goes on. “Have you ever seen _True Romance_?”

“No,” David answers, and Mia manages to stop herself from visibly sighing. It really is a miracle the tape isn’t worn to static at this point. Maybe they should invest in a LaserDisc setup, or one of those new DVD players. If she has to watch the same movie for the rest of eternity, it should at least be a good quality version.

As Heath gets up to change over from the documentary to the movie, voice more animated than it’s sounded all night, David making quiet sounds of reply, Mia leans back and shuts her eyes contentedly.

It’s too unresolved to be any kind of ending, even the ambiguous kind, but Mia isn’t looking for any kind of ending — what use would an ending be, to someone who’s going to live forever?

But… as the beginning of something, this might be acceptable. It’s a start.

-


End file.
